BACKGROUND AND HISTORY The Coalition was founded in 1990 by the Association of Research Libraries(ARL), CAUSE, and Educom. ARL represents the research libraries of NorthAmerica. CAUSE and Educom were organizations concerned with the use ofinformation technology in higher education. In 1998, CAUSE and Educommerged to create the new EDUCAUSE organization, which has broad membershipfrom the higher education community and their technology partners.
In establishing CNI, these sponsor organizations recognized the need to broaden the community’s thinking beyond issues of network connectivity and bandwidth to encompass networked information content and applications. Reaping the benefits of the Internet for scholarship, research, and education demands new partnerships, new institutional roles, and new technologies and infrastructure.The Coalition seeks to further these collaborations, to explore these new roles, and to catalyze the development and deployment of the necessary technology base.
The Coalition is supported by a Task Force of about 200 dues-paying member institutions representing higher education, publishing, networking, information technology, government agencies, museums, libraries, and library organizations. Membership in the Coalition’s Task Force is open to all organizations — both for profitand not-for-profit — that share CNI’s commitment to furthering thedevelopment of networked information.
The Task Force will meet twice in 2002-2003: once in San Antonio, Texas,December 5-6, 2002, and again in Washington, DC, April 28-29, 2003, inconjunction with the EDUCAUSE Networking 2003 meeting.
The Coalition’s program is guided by a Steering Committee chaired by Richard West of the California State University system. As sponsor organizations, ARL and EDUCAUSE each appoint three representatives to the Steering Committee drawn from their member leadership. Three “at large” representatives on the Steering Committee provide additional perspectives. The executive directors of ARL, EDUCAUSE, and CNI serve as ex officio members of the committee.
Paul Evan Peters was the founding executive director of the Coalition, serving until his untimely death in 1996. Joan Lippincott, now CNI’s associate executive director, served as interim executive director until the appointment of Clifford Lynch as the new executive director in July 1997.
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PROGRAM THEMES
The work of the Coalition is structured around three central themes that we believe are the essential foundations of the vision of advancing scholarship and intellectual productivity:
Developing and Managing Networked Information Content
A network that will play an integral role in scholarly discourse and productivity must be rich in content and information resources. The Coalition seeks tomobilize and bring together the many diverse communities that create andmanage content. It works with these communities to develop methods ofcreating, organizing, evaluating, managing, and preserving networkedinformation resources. The Coalition also furthers the development of economic,policy, social, and legal frameworks that sustain the creation and management ofnetworked information and facilitate its access.
Transforming Organizations, Professions, and Individuals
The use of networked information is transforming institutions, professions, and the practices of learning and scholarship. For academic institutions, success inthe new environment requires an unprecedented degree of collaboration amonglibraries, information technology groups, faculty, instructional technologists,museums, university presses, and other units; it demands new alliances andpartnerships with publishers, information technology and network serviceproviders, scholarly societies, government, and other sectors. Organizations mustdevelop and share new strategies, policies, and best practices. Of equalimportance is the need to assess and measure the impacts of the new environmenton institutions and their activities as the transformation progresses. Professionsneed to develop new competencies and enter into new dialogues that crosstraditional disciplinary boundaries. The Coalition seeks to facilitate thesecollaborations and dialogues and to help professions and institutions worktogether in program strategy formulation and impact assessment.
Building Technology, Standards, and Infrastructure
The networked information environment relies on the development anddeployment of standards and infrastructure components in order to enable the discovery, use, and management of networked information. The ability to use collections of resources in a unified, consistent fashion is essential and requires a continuing focus on interoperability of services. At the same time, promising new technologies need to be explored, assessed and tested, and sometimes adapted to the needs of the CNI community. No one institution acting alone can build theneeded infrastructure or explore the full range of new technologies as they become available. Accomplishing these goals requires a coordinated communitywide effort. CNI seeks to provide leadership in this undertaking, to offer a context for collaborative experiments and test beds, and to serve as a focal point for sharing knowledge about new technologies.
The specific program initiatives that further these themes evolve from year to year.The initiatives and strategies planned for 2002-2003 are described below; mostbuild upon and continue earlier efforts already underway. Many of the initiativesseek to make strategic progress relevant to more than one theme. It is importantto recognize that the networked information environment is changing rapidly.CNI is continually adapting its activities in response to new developments andopportunities. Indeed, the Coalition believes agility is essential in the currentenvironment and invites a continuous dialogue with the members of the TaskForce on the need for additional program initiatives. Because of this, the 2002-2003 Program Plan should be viewed as a snapshot of our thinking aboutpriorities and opportunities as of December 2002 that will inevitably developfurther during the coming year.
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ADVOCACY AND CONSULTATIVE ACTIVITIES
In addition to specific initiatives to address these overarching themes, the Coalition actively conducts an ongoing program of collaboration and advocacy to advance the development of networked information and its role in transforming organizations and scholarly activities. This is accomplished through both printbased and network publications; through participation in conferences, meetings, workshops, and committees on an institutional, regional, national, and international level; through contributions to standards efforts; throughcollaboration with key funding agencies, such as the National ScienceFoundation, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the NationalEndowment for the Humanities, the Department of Education, and the AndrewW. Mellon Foundation; and through participation in organizations such as the World Wide Web Consortium and the Internet Society. Of particular note in this area are our contributions to the Library of Congress’s efforts to map out a National Digital Preservation Program and to various studies and programs conducted by the U.S. National Research Council. On an international level, we collaborate with other organizations concerned with networked information, including the U.K. Office for Library Networking (UKOLN) and the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) in the United Kingdom and the German Initiative for Networked Information (DINI).
In addition to contributing to the programs of our sponsor organizations, ARL and EDUCAUSE, we also support, contribute to, and collaborate closely with other organizations that share in specific aspects of our programmatic interests and priorities as a strategic part of our own program work. These include:
The National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage (NINCH), a broad coalition of arts, humanities and social science groups. CNI, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), and the Getty Information Institute founded NINCH in 1996, and CNI is represented on its board. NINCH initiatives of particular relevance include its Copyright Town Meetings and the development of the NINCH Guide to Good Practice in the Digital Representation of Cultural Heritage Materials.
The University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development (UCAID) manages the Internet2 initiative to promote advanced networking and applications within the higher education community. CNI is represented on the Internet2 Applications Strategy Council and works with UCAID on numerous interests, including video and multimedia applications and standards and high bandwidth content-intensive applications.
The Computer Interchange of Museum Information (CIMI) project is focused on standards, pilot projects, and research to support network-based access and exchange of museum and cultural heritage information. CNI is a CIMI member and is represented on CIMI’s executive committee.
The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) addresses a broadrange of issues involving the scholarly communication system, higher education, and libraries. The Digital Library Federation (DLF) is a CLIR program focused on the use of digital library technologies within research libraries. CNI collaborates extensively with CLIR and DLF on issues ranging from digital preservationto metadata.
The Coalition also contributes to the development of the networked information community by hosting electronic discussion groups, such as the CNI–COPYRIGHT forum, and acting as a distribution point for materials via its Web site and the CNI-ANNOUNCE e-mail list.
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MEETINGS
The Coalition’s twice-annual Task Force meetings, scheduled for December 5-6, 2002, in San Antonio, Texas, and April 28-29, 2003, in Washington, DC, not only allow CNI to highlight activities related to its program themes and to focus attention on significant new thinking and technology developments, but also provide an opportunity for the members to showcase and discuss a wide range of emerging issues and developments in networked information. Each member organization is invited to send two delegates, typically a senior information technologist and a senior librarian. Meeting participants are introduced to new developments that may reshape institutional plans in a forum that encourages collaborations and dialogues with others who share common interests.
CNI regularly co-sponsors a conference in partnership with JISC and UKOLN as part of our ongoing collaboration with these programs. The last conference was held June 25-27, 2002, in Edinburgh, Scotland. Planning is underway for another conference to be held in 2004.
CNI occasionally convenes invitational or public workshops to advance specific elements of its program plan and acts as a sponsor or co-sponsor for other meetings relevant to the CNI agenda. This year, such events include the EDUCAUSE Networking 2003 meeting, to be held in Washington, DC, April 30-May 1, 2003, immediately following the Spring 2003 CNI Task Force meeting and the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, scheduled for May 27-31, 2003, in Houston, Texas.
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DEVELOPING AND MANAGING NETWORKEDINFORMATION CONTENT
CNI has broad interests in all types of digital content—for example, text, images, data, and mixed media objects—that can be used in conjunction with research and education, and we provide a forum for exchange of information on leading projects in this arena. In addition, we track developments and promote strategies for creation of digital libraries and for federated collections of digital content. Through our Task Force meetings, specialized conferences, collaborativeinitiatives with other organizations, papers and presentations, we provide leadership on digital content policy issues, economic frameworks, and scholarly communication developments.
Institutional Content Resources and Repositories
We have reorganized many of our initiatives in the content area around the broad theme of the stewardship of institutional content resources, a central role for higher education institutions and libraries in the digital age. This includes efforts to capture and structure digital content, such as CNI’s participation with Internet2 in the Performance Archive and Retrieval Working Group, which should make draft guidelines for the digital recording of a wide range of performance eventsavailable for public review and comment during this program year. The Coalition’s continuing effort to understand and highlight experiments in the creation of new types of scholarly works for the digital medium, such as successors to the printed scholarly monograph, also contributes to this theme, as does our ongoing participation in the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations, which seeks to facilitate the migration of theses and dissertations to digital form. Metadata schemes such as METS are fundamental enabling technology for describing and organizing complex digital content resources, and we will workwith our partners at the Digital Library Federation (DLF) to advance thisstandards effort. Finally, our work in stewardship of institutional content resources also encompasses efforts to understand and share best practices surrounding all aspects of institutional repositories, from policy to system architecture, building on collaborations such as the repositories workshop that we sponsored with the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and SPARC in October 2002.
Metadata and Digital Rights Management
Tracking rights and permissions is central to our ability to share and reuse information; structuring appropriate metadata for this purpose is also essential for successful dissemination and long-term stewardship within the context of institutional repositories. We have ongoing efforts, building on the September 9, 2002,NSF-funded workshop that CNI co-sponsored with Internet2, ViDe, and SURA, to advance a program for the documentation and management of rights related to digital content in educational and other non-commercial settings.
Digital Preservation
Also closely related to the work on stewardship of institutional content resources is the Coalition’s continued work on preservation of digital content. This is a central issue in the shift to network-based scholarly communication, and has also now emerged as a broad and fundamental social and public policy issue. CNI continues to work with ARL and other partner organizations, including DLF, the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, JSTOR, and the Research Libraries Group (RLG) on the full range of technical, economic, and strategic issues surrounding digital preservation. We have continued to collaborate with the Library of Congress in its efforts to developand build consensus around a national digital preservation strategy. The Coalition also continues to explore issues at the juncture of records management, archival practice, and preservation of digital materials through its support of the Arizona State University ECURE conferences, the most recent of which was held in October 2002. Developments in digital preservation will continue to be highlighted at Task Force meetings.
Learning Management Systems
Learning Support and Management Systems have emerged as another keyarchitectural and strategic component within the new digital landscape for scholarship. The Coalition has identified three key areas of interest here. The first is to understand and clarify the architectural, technical, and service-based relationships among learning management systems, library systems, and library provided digital content. The second is to work with partners such as the Instructional Management System (IMS) initiative and the Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI) to clarify the relationships between learning management systems and institutional repositories. The third area of interest is to explore information management issues raised by learning management systems; in this connection, we have authored a paper, which will be available through the EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research (ECAR) program in late 2002, that examines policy questions related to the reuse of content contained in course sites in the learning management system context. Sessions at the fall and spring Task Force meetings will examine all three of these areas.
Computer Science and the Humanities
CNI is participating with NINCH, the U.S. National Research Council, and the American Council of Learned Societies in a Steering Committee for Computer Science and the Humanities that seeks to promote the application of the information sciences to the understanding of the human record. The Steering Committee has obtained funding from the Carnegie Corporation for the first in a series of major conferences to bring together computer scientists and humanities scholars to advance the use of information technologies in humanities research through collaboration between these disciplines. This conference is scheduled for January 2003, in Washington, DC.
Knowledge Tools
Finally, in the 2002-2003 program year CNI will initiate work in best practices for the construction and exploitation of structured and reusable knowledge objects. This project will explore ways in which reference works and knowledge tools such as dictionaries, encyclopedias, gazetteers, vocabularies, thesauri, and taxonomies can be represented in digital form in such a way that they can provide reusable building blocks for the development of digital libraries, with the goal ofproviding guidance to authors, funding agencies, and digital library developers. We will focus particularly on approaches that will facilitate the computational reuse and integration of such works into emerging digital knowledge environments, and on contributions that developing technologies from areas such as computational linguistics might play. CNI expects to hold at least one workshop in this area in 2003.
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TRANSFORMING ORGANIZATIONS, PROFESSIONS, AND INDIVIDUALS
Collaborative Facilities
In 2002-2003 we will continue the partnership with Dartmouth College,launched in the last program year, to develop a Web site featuring plans and related materials for collaborative facilities. A number of institutions are offering public service points or facilities where library and information technology staff share responsibilities to serve users; other institutions are establishing teaching and learning support centers that bring together instructional technologists, faculty, information technologists, and librarians. Typically, these service points and centers are developed in conjunction with building renovations, expansions, or new building projects. There is great interest in sharing experiences and plans in this area, and the Web site at Dartmouth includes planning documents, architectural layouts, programmatic descriptions, and other information provided by institutions active in such projects. We want to substantially enlarge the number of institutions that are contributing to the Dartmouth site, and will alsocontinue to schedule project briefings at the Task Force meetings and at the EDUCAUSE annual conference highlighting initiatives in this area. During 2002-2003 we will also be working with the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (NITLE) consortium of liberal arts colleges on workshops onplanning technology-enabled teaching and learning spaces.
Transformative Assessment Project
CNI will continue its work on the Transformative Assessment Project, which was launched in 2001-2002 in collaboration with the EDUCAUSE National Learning Infrastructure Initiative (NLII) and the TLT Group. This program focuses on using assessment to assist in transforming teaching and learning using technology; our work in 2001-2002 combined an in-person workshop with follow-on online course/community services. In 2002-2003 we expect to hold a second round of the program with an additional partner, the American Association for Higher Education (AAHE) Assessment Forum, in late spring 2003. We also seek to re-shape the online course/community system as a venue for peer development and consultation in a structured environment rather thanas a venue in which to learn about the techniques of assessment, recognizing that the key audience for this system is a committed group of early adopters of transformational assessment approaches.
Executive Roundtable
Finally, in 2002-2003 CNI will inaugurate a new program called the Executive Roundtable. Building on the theme of collaboration between librarians and information technologists that is at the foundation of the Coalition, this program will assemble pairs of chief librarians and information technology officers (plus perhaps one additional representative from each participating organization,depending on topic) from about ten organizations per Task Force meeting on an invitational basis for a focused two- to three-hour discussion of a specific topic.Topics may include institutional repositories, learning management systems, the role of university presses, and privacy and security issues. Initially, these sessions will take place on the first morning of the Task Force meetings. We hope to hold the first such session at the Spring 2003 meeting in Washington, DC. If there is sufficient interest, we may extend the Executive Roundtables toother venues.
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BUILDING TECHNOLOGY, STANDARDS,AND INFRASTRUCTURE
CNI continues to be actively engaged in key areas of standards and infrastructure development. The Coalition is particularly concerned with facilitating the difficult and delicate transition of standards and technologies into operational infrastructure for the research, higher education, and library communities. In addition to the major program initiatives described here, CNI is closely tracking a wide range of developments in areas as diverse as identifiers, digital books,metadata standards, and recommender systems and personalization technologies.
Architectural Standards for New Academic Platforms
During the past two years, ARL has provided a focus for renewed interest from the library community in a cluster of ideas, variously called “scholar’s portals,” “academic platforms,” or “scholar’s toolkits,” to assist information seekers in locating, using, and contributing to the ever-growing diversity of academic and scholarly information resources. As these ideas have been refined, the community is recognizing the limitations of services such as commercial Web search engines,traditional library automation tools such as online catalogs, and stand-alone abstracting and indexing databases. We also recognize the need to integrate new and existing resources with the emerging technologies of learning management systems. The Coalition supports architectural and standards frameworks that can facilitate the development of interoperable and complementary prototype systems in this area and ultimately contribute to the development of a vibrant marketplace in such systems as they are created by the private sector, by university-industry collaborations, or by university-based projects. In spring 2002 we sponsored a workshop in collaboration with ARL to begin to map out developments in this area. One outcome of the workshop was the focus on institutional repositories as part of the broader issue of stewardship of institutional content resources discussed above; another was the initiation of work dealing specifically with learning management systems, also described above. Our ongoing work in the architectural contexts area is characterized by an emphasis on access and reuse of content from a user’s perspective; it deals specifically with portals, search engines, and the role of the open archives metadata harvesting technology. We will hold a follow-on workshop in 2003 to survey these issues more specifically.
Open Archives Metadata Harvesting Initiative
In 2000 CNI launched a major new initiative in the infrastructure and standards area with its investment (jointly with DLF) in the Open Archives Initiative (OAI). The goal of this work, which grew out of a meeting held in Santa Fe in 1999 to federate e-print archives, is to develop the necessary standards and infrastructure to permit repository sites to expose metadata for harvesting and subsequent reuse by upper-layer applications. The technical specifications can be used to federate e-print archives, publisher Web sites, or collections of digital objects created from special collections or museum holdings, for example. A clearinghouse for the project was established at Cornell University under the management of Carl Lagoze and Herbert Van de Sompel, and a steering committee and technical committee were set up to guide the work. The first release of the revised OAI technical specifications took place in December 2000, with meetings in the United States and Europe in early 2001 to review this work. A "final" version of the OAI technical specifications was released in 2002. A large number of implementationprojects are now underway, including a group sponsored by the Andrew W.Mellon Foundation in the United States and several European-funded projects. CNI’s work in this area will conclude around the end of 2002, although we will continue to feature work on applications of the metadata harvesting protocol at Task Force meetings in the coming year and may charter some additional work focused on supporting specific applications as required.
Authentication, Authorization, and Access Management
Authentication and authorization have emerged as essential infrastructurerequirements for network-based access to information and have become aparticularly critical need as institutions enter into site-license arrangements with publishers and other information providers, implement online and distance education initiatives, or form consortia for resource sharing. The Coalition has been pursuing a program to define technology approaches, standards, best practices, and policy and business issues for such an inter-organizational authentication and authorization infrastructure, and to help early adopter Task Force member organizations share implementation experiences and explore interoperability issues. Working in partnership with Internet2, EDUCAUSE’s Net@EDU, and DLF we will continue to illuminate many of the planning, operational, and budgetary issues involved in implementing public key infrastructure (PKI). A critical outcome of this work has been the development ofthe Shibboleth distributed authentication system as part of the NSF-funded middleware initiative at Internet2; CNI, DLF, and Internet2 jointly sponsored aworkshop in the spring of 2002 to present this work to the content provider community, and in the fall of 2002 Shibboleth entered initial field trials that involve a number of universities and content providers. During the 2002-2003 program year we will advance these field trials, and report on early experiences through the Task Force meetings. Another high priority for CNI in this area is to update our paper on authentication and access management to reflect current developments and provide our community with an accessible summary of the state of the art.
A related new initiative will examine content-related security issues, with a particular focus on issues at CNI member institutions that license access to content resources on behalf of their communities. We are seeing the emergence of complex new threats in this area that call for new strategies and give rise to new responsibilities for institutions that license such resources. The Coalition believes that these issues should be reflected as part of the developing emphasis on systems and network security in higher education.
Image Retrieval Benchmark Database
Another infrastructure initiative, launched in late 2000, addresses current problems in image retrieval systems for scholarly content. CLIR is underwriting this work, and CNI chairs the planning group. The fundamental problem is that there are a wide range of proposed metadata approaches for image content (many of which are very expensive to apply), and many prototype systems for retrieving images based either on metadata or content analysis, or some combination of the two strategies. What seems to be needed is a benchmark database (including metadata) that can allow system developers to explore both the retrieval effectiveness and cost-performance tradeoffs involved in various metadata approaches and system designs. The goal is to design a benchmark database resource that might serve as infrastructure for the communities that develop imagedatabases and retrieval systems in much the same way as the TREC databases have served the text retrieval community. During 2000-2001 we convened a workshop to explore design alternatives; we expect that this project will conclude in early 2003 after presentation and discussion of a draft report at the Fall 2002 Task Force meeting and the subsequent distribution of a final report.
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